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On "The Infectious Myth" host David Crowe will examine the questionable or outright false paradigms that infect our society.
Episodes
Tuesday Jun 24, 2014
Tuesday Jun 24, 2014
In Episode 18 of “The Infectious Myth” David discusses science that Dr. Simon Silver of the University of Illinois at Chicago believes is “beyond the fringe” and should not be published or funded. He put forward these ideas in a recent review article in the journal “Microbiology Letters” entitled, “Beyond the fringe: when science moves from innovative to nonsense”.
Dr. Silver describes 5 examples of what he considers science so obviously bad that the journal and peer reviewers should have recognized this, but failed to do. David brings up the other side of the equation, if we suppress science because we think it is ridiculous, we will probably also suppress innovative ideas. And, in fact, Dr. Silver agrees that some of his own most innovative ideas were rejected from publication, and there is already a higher risk of an innovative paper getting rejected than something that is more mundane.
The discussion is wide ranging, including a discussion of Lamarckian inheritance versus epigenetics, the influence of Lysenko on Russian genetics, Continental Drift, the effectiveness of the Peer Review process for grants and publication, and finally the AIDS scientists Gallo, Duesberg and Montagnier.